Simplifying LDS Life

GEEK.Q.P. — Use tech to organize an Elders Quorum

Here’s how we’ve organized our Elders Quorum: We have a Google Sites site, and it links to all the important documents people might need.

After the home page, we have a page for the sacrament. There’s a Google Spreadsheet embedded in the page that can be edited by anyone on the web. So our Elders use that page to easily sign up for preparing, blessing, and passing the sacrament. Our Sacrament Coordinator makes sure the list is always filled out ahead of time, and he does a great job.

The next tab lists the teaching schedule with another embedded Google Spreadsheet. Only the instructors and the presidency have editing privileges for this doc. But the whole quorum can see the schedule and keep up with the reading. If an instructor can’t teach during his week, it’s easy for him to coordinate swapping days with someone else. Our instructors have been doing super well with this too.

Next we have a page that lists District Leaders (in case anyone missed the memo). There’s a link to a private Google Spreadsheet in which home teaching is recorded. The district leaders and the presidency are the only ones who have access to see or edit this doc. I’ll show you a bit of it below.

This is the home teaching spreadsheet. It lists companionships and the elders and sisters they’re assigned to look after. District leaders can report directly whether those individuals were served (according to the goals set by districts—and these actually vary slightly by district). They can also insert comments on each individual for every month so there’s a running record of how people are doing. A spreadsheet like this also makes it a cinch to give a monthly report to the Stake Presidency (you can tally numbers automatically).

In the screenshot of the spreadsheet, you can see basically all the data we collect. The only thing you can’t observe is that the cells are limited to four responses (validation): Hit, Miss, EQP, N/A. And then it just totals those entries at the top so we’re all ready to report to the stake presidency.

As a presidency, we have discussed the privacy issue—all the district leaders can see who has and hasn’t done their home teaching. But so far we’re okay with that. (We like to be proud of our hits and our misses—after all, nobody’s perfect.) I like your idea of using a form though. Sounds more complicated to set up, but it fixes the privacy problem.

I googled for “Elders’ Quorum website” and this was one of the *relevant* hits. I like this idea. I’ve been using a weekly e-mail newsletter with links to various google docs and spreadsheets, but I like the idea of putting everything into a website so that it’s accessible at any time.

P.S. my wife Sarah is your cousin and she thought it was great that I stumbled on your article.